Erm, proton-proton fusion results in a deuterium nucleus plus a positron. see my above comment for a link. Or try just googling "proton fusion" and hit the "I'm feeling lucky" button.:P
Ahem.
Yes, you can have proton-proton fusion.
The result is a deuterium nucleus plus a positron (anti-electron) And yes, this is what primarily powers the Sun.
You are correct that our currency is not backed by precious metals, and is only worth whatever someone will give you for it. However, gold is only worth what someone will give you for it as well, but fiat currency has the advantage that the government can control the total supply of money, and thus limit inflation.
You mean "... and thus create inflation", right? You do realize that the purchasing power of a US $ basically did not change from the 1790's until 1933, with the bulk of modern inflation happening after 1960 orso, and that as a result, the US$ is now worth roughly 1/20th of it's origional value. And, yes, the gov't does create inflation deliberately. (And no that's not any sort of conspiricy theory, the Fed flat out says this, albeit in jargon-laden gov't econowonk terms. The rationalization is that inflation spurs the economy by making it cheaper to borrow money (because the money you are paying back is worth less than what you borrowed). I think this is a load of old tripe, myself, but that is the gov'ts idea of it. Of course, knowing that the US gov't is one of the biggest borrowers out there also helps to suggest why they think this is good, as well)
Heh. I'll verify this. I used to work for a gifts company (famous for fruit baskets, and candy, but they sold all kinds of stuff) which sold online. The company was all-american in name and origion, but was actually owned by a japanese conglomerate. When the parent company realized (after many years) that they owned this business (and that it was fairly successfull), they requested a japanese version of the web-site & product catalog.
At that there was a hurried restructuring of the product lines sold in the japanese version of the catalog. Amongst other things, *All* items sold in sets of 4 were changed to sets of 3.
Eeeepp.... ! Once a **SECOND** ?! That is just plain nuts. I happen to be in the midst of setting up a monitoring system for a hosting company at this moment, and we're doing 5 min. intervals at most. Perhaps mebbe, for uber-important services we MIGHT one day monitor faster. But that's a big mebbe. You'd have to be in a situation where that extra 4 min or so is worth the costs in load on the system.
Anyway, as long as folks are talking monitoring systems, (I here nagios mentioned a few times) we are using OpenNMS. Anyone else out there have much experience w/ it? It seems to be a major, industrial grade system (which is good fer what we do) with all the power, and complexity that implies.
Heh, So many companies use stock art for their websites & ad-copy, it can be amusing when somebody doesn't.
As it happens, the company I work for (www.rackspace.com) uses real pictures of it's employees in it's webpages & ad art. This becomes very amusing when somebody else thinks the pictures are stock clipart and poaches them for their own site. There's one pic of a guy plugging in some network cables that has wound up everywhere, including on the websites of several of Rackspace's competitors. The amusing part is that the guy in the photo is actaually one of the founders of our company!
I used to work on the websites for Harry & David, a catalog gift company (they invented the fruit-of-the-month club). H & D has used this sort of multiple-shopping cart system since 1999 at least. (Their biggest business is xmas gifts, ya see. Thus the multiple cart thing makes sense)
Amazon is asking for trouble here. Harry & David is a half-billion dollar a year subsidiary of a multi-billion dollar Japanese conglomerate (Yamaguchi). They are also a SERIOUSLY nasty company when it comes to legal stuff.
Erm, actually, It does say what they have to do, and are forbidden from doing the opposite of.
It's a general Constitutional principal. The federal gov't is explicitly forbidden to do anything that the Constitution does not explicity say that it can do.
Probably memory leaks in your JSP code.
(Yes, java can have memory leaks. Accidentally keeping references you don't need will leak memory, and/or other resources)
Various abuse of the Session object is probably the biggest one fer this.
Yeh, I would LOVE to see a decent micropayment system. So far, alas, all of them I've seen have problems.
For example, I've tried e-gold, and love the idea.The fatal flaw for it, tho is it's bloody near impossible to actually put money into your e-gold acount to start actually using it!
Creating the account was real easy, but to actually put money into it, you have to go thru some third parties, and there are none I repeat none of them who will let you transfer funds to an egold account with a credit card or electronic transfer from your checking account. This alone torpedoes the whole deal. A few dedicated folks might go thru all the rigermarole of sending in a check to some agency, and waiting a week or two for it to process, but not many.
Yeh, and it's been a complete mess, (at least here in So. oregon) Mis-printed ballots, lost voter registrations (Really, I WAS going to vote for Harry Browne, but the county lost my voter registration and I didn't find out about it till AFTER the registration deadline)
Yaaaarrrghhh. Honestly if i was the conspiricy type, I'd be wondering who decided to f-up the the voting in the state w/ what has to be the highest level of third party support in the union.
What really pisses me off, tho, is not just the presidential vote, but the more important bit... All the state refferendums.
The differance between dealing with tonic for my.to domains and NSI for my.com and.org domains is night and day. On Tonic, I do everything over the web, my changes appear the next _day_, and they don't bother me. Their service is wonderfull. I hightly reccomend them.
Actually, IIRC the OS X GUI is DPS (Display PostScript), same as what NeXT used.
DPS is similar to Sun's old NeWS system, which also used Postscript to draw on the screen. NeWS was supposed to have been rather neat, but being propritary killed it.
There's a great example of open broadband net (and even CATV) here in my home town ( Ashland, OR)
The city decided it wasn't going to wait for the big broadband 'net-access carriers to get around to servicing this area, so they're laying Fiber Gigabit Ethernet throughout the whole town! (It's called the Ashland Fiber Network)
What they've got going with the local ISP's is this:
The city provides the bandwith, but dosen't want to have to deal with the more labor intensive parts of the ISP biz, like tech support for computer neophytes, or keeping email servers running, so, they only deal directly with big users, like businesses, and uber-users. For them, they just bring the gigabit fiber to the door, tap off a 10 or 100Mbps Ethernet connection, and are more-or-less done with it.
the 'regular' user population goes thru the ISPs. They basicaly just re-sell the city's bandwidth, and add services like webspace, email servers, and, importantly, tech support. (the 'normal' net users get a little lower bandwidth, as they bring that service to the door over a 5Mbps coax cable, using a standard cablemodem (presumably to save costs by reusing existing cables) Unlike regular cablemodem systems, tho, the coax only goes from your door to the curb, where it gets tied to the fiber, so yer not sharing it with your 100 closest neighbors)
There is another local broadband net provider around here, the local cable co, Falcon, has a internet service. It's interesting to note that the City competes w/ Falcon doubly. Falcon has it's Cable-TV infrastructure, which they also offer net service over, and the City has it's Internet infrastructure, which they also offer digital cable TV over.
So, we have both, the ISP's competing w/ each other and sharing the City's cables, and the City and Falcon competing with each other, each with their own cables.
Whilst I doubt manyfolk are going to be running Netscape on ther server and browsing, this still is a valid point.
Namely, what if it was another service you wanted to run whilst serving up webpages? What would the results be if the machines were also acting as DNS, email, or backend database servers too? Or even running CGI's? These were only static tests. I recall seeing an article PC mag did before on web server performance. The static performance was similar to this test, but IIRC, NT got tromped in the CGI tests.
Honestly, it's not really a big deal. All a clone is is an identical twin who happens to be a generation younger. That's basically it. Big Deal.
Even if the technique becomes accessable to the point where any hospital can do it, it probably won't be used much. It'll have less impact than In-vitro fertalization.
Mostly, cloning will be used for exactly what it started with. Cloning sheep. (and prize bulls, etc) that's where the money is.
And for the one or two rich, self centered bastards out there who will have themselves cloned, really, I couldn't _think_ of a better punishment than for them to have a child who is exactly like _them_:>
Full brain transplants are not only do-able now, but have been done in monkeys. The problem right now is re-connecting the spinal cord (the transplantees wind up quadraplegic)
It really depends on how you look at it. Intellectual Property really isn't neccesary, even for business.
This becomes clearer when ye take a look at _where_ the value placed on ideas comes from. It comes from the _work_ that the individual(s) who created it put into it.
So, sure, authors, programmers, artists, and software companies deserve to be paid. They deserve to be paid for the same reason teachers, plumbers,or the telephone company deserve to be paid, they do valuble work, they provide a valuble _service_, not for creating valuble products.
It's the programmING, not the program that's valuble, the writING, not what's written. Any idiot (or machine) can make a million copies of a program, or piece of text. What takes effort (and thus creates value) is designing that in the first place.
Intellectual Property is a distraction. What we need is more protection and focus on those who provide Intellectual Services, rather than more legal whoo-haa trying to define 'Intellectual Property'.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeh, looks like it to me too.
(I used to live in Ashland, OR)
Erm, proton-proton fusion results in a deuterium nucleus plus a positron. see my above comment for a link. Or try just googling "proton fusion" and hit the "I'm feeling lucky" button. :P
Yes, you can have proton-proton fusion. The result is a deuterium nucleus plus a positron (anti-electron) And yes, this is what primarily powers the Sun.
see Here (amongst other sites) for details.
I thought it was good.
You got to love a book that starts with it raining telephones.
Heh. I'll verify this. I used to work for a gifts company (famous for fruit baskets, and candy, but they sold all kinds of stuff) which sold online. The company was all-american in name and origion, but was actually owned by a japanese conglomerate. When the parent company realized (after many years) that they owned this business (and that it was fairly successfull), they requested a japanese version of the web-site & product catalog.
At that there was a hurried restructuring of the product lines sold in the japanese version of the catalog. Amongst other things, *All* items sold in sets of 4 were changed to sets of 3.
A full case of ramen noodles. From my sister.
Funny thing is, *I* am the one in my family who can actually cook.
Eeeepp.... ! Once a **SECOND** ?! That is just plain nuts. I happen to be in the midst of setting up a monitoring system for a hosting company at this moment, and we're doing 5 min. intervals at most.
Perhaps mebbe, for uber-important services we MIGHT one day monitor faster. But that's a big mebbe. You'd have to be in a situation where that extra 4 min or so is worth the costs in load on the system.
Anyway, as long as folks are talking monitoring systems, (I here nagios mentioned a few times) we are using OpenNMS. Anyone else out there have much experience w/ it? It seems to be a major, industrial grade system (which is good fer what we do) with all the power, and complexity that implies.
Heh, So many companies use stock art for their websites & ad-copy, it can be amusing when somebody doesn't.
As it happens, the company I work for (www.rackspace.com) uses real pictures of it's employees in it's webpages & ad art. This becomes very amusing when somebody else thinks the pictures are stock clipart and poaches them for their own site. There's one pic of a guy plugging in some network cables that has wound up everywhere, including on the websites of several of Rackspace's competitors. The amusing part is that the guy in the photo is actaually one of the founders of our company!
Amazon is asking for trouble here. Harry & David is a half-billion dollar a year subsidiary of a multi-billion dollar Japanese conglomerate (Yamaguchi). They are also a SERIOUSLY nasty company when it comes to legal stuff.
It's a general Constitutional principal. The federal gov't is explicitly forbidden to do anything that the Constitution does not explicity say that it can do.
Probably memory leaks in your JSP code.
(Yes, java can have memory leaks. Accidentally keeping references you don't need will leak memory, and/or other resources)
Various abuse of the Session object is probably the biggest one fer this.
The local electric utility buried 1000baseFX loops under the street here. You can get 5, 10 or 100Mbit tap-offs (even the 100 is cheaper than a t1)
They also run digital cable-tv over it too.
For example, I've tried e-gold, and love the idea.The fatal flaw for it, tho is it's bloody near impossible to actually put money into your e-gold acount to start actually using it!
Creating the account was real easy, but to actually put money into it, you have to go thru some third parties, and there are none I repeat none of them who will let you transfer funds to an egold account with a credit card or electronic transfer from your checking account. This alone torpedoes the whole deal. A few dedicated folks might go thru all the rigermarole of sending in a check to some agency, and waiting a week or two for it to process, but not many.
Yeh, and it's been a complete mess, (at least here in So. oregon) Mis-printed ballots, lost voter registrations (Really, I WAS going to vote for Harry Browne, but the county lost my voter registration and I didn't find out about it till AFTER the registration deadline)
Yaaaarrrghhh. Honestly if i was the conspiricy type, I'd be wondering who decided to f-up the the voting in the state w/ what has to be the highest level of third party support in the union.
What really pisses me off, tho, is not just the presidential vote, but the more important bit... All the state refferendums.
It's rather nice (Ashland fiber Network)
I use Tonic. (they register in the .to domain )
.to domains and NSI for my .com and .org domains is night and day. On Tonic, I do everything over the web, my changes appear the next _day_, and they don't bother me. Their service is wonderfull. I hightly reccomend them.
The differance between dealing with tonic for my
Actually, IIRC the OS X GUI is
DPS (Display PostScript), same as what NeXT used.
DPS is similar to Sun's old NeWS system, which also used Postscript to draw on the screen. NeWS was supposed to have been rather neat, but being propritary killed it.
There's a great example of open broadband net (and even CATV) here in my home town ( Ashland, OR)
The city decided it wasn't going to wait for the big broadband 'net-access carriers to get around to servicing this area, so they're laying Fiber Gigabit Ethernet throughout the whole town! (It's called the Ashland Fiber Network)
What they've got going with the local ISP's is this:
There is another local broadband net provider around here, the local cable co, Falcon, has a internet service. It's interesting to note that the City competes w/ Falcon doubly. Falcon has it's Cable-TV infrastructure, which they also offer net service over, and the City has it's Internet infrastructure, which they also offer digital cable TV over.
So, we have both, the ISP's competing w/ each other and sharing the City's cables, and the City and Falcon competing with each other, each with their own cables.
Whilst I doubt manyfolk are going to be running Netscape on ther server and browsing, this still is a valid point.
Namely, what if it was another service you wanted to run whilst serving up webpages?
What would the results be if the machines were also acting as DNS, email, or backend database servers too? Or even running CGI's? These were only static tests. I recall seeing an article PC mag did before on web server performance. The static performance was similar to this test, but IIRC, NT got tromped in the CGI tests.
I suspect they mean 25% more efficient for RECEPTION. (i.e. given signal strength X they pick
up a 25% stronger signal)
A good thing if yer trying to receive sat signals (i.e. for built in GPS) or in areas where cell coverage is weak.
C-Forge ( http://www.codeforge.com) is close. Not perfect, but close.
It does use it's own editor, tho.
Honestly, it's not really a big deal.
:>
All a clone is is an identical twin who happens to be a generation younger. That's basically it. Big Deal.
Even if the technique becomes accessable to the point where any hospital can do it, it probably won't be used much. It'll have less impact than In-vitro fertalization.
Mostly, cloning will be used for exactly what it started with. Cloning sheep. (and prize bulls, etc) that's where the money is.
And for the one or two rich, self centered bastards out there who will have themselves cloned, really, I couldn't _think_ of a better punishment than for them to have a child who is exactly like _them_
Been there, done that.
Full brain transplants are not only do-able now,
but have been done in monkeys. The problem
right now is re-connecting the spinal cord
(the transplantees wind up quadraplegic)
It really depends on how you look at it. Intellectual Property really isn't neccesary, even for business.
This becomes clearer when ye take a look at _where_ the value placed on ideas comes from. It comes from the _work_ that the individual(s) who created it put into it.
So, sure, authors, programmers, artists, and software companies deserve to be paid. They deserve to be paid for the same reason teachers, plumbers,or the telephone company deserve to be paid, they do valuble work, they provide a valuble _service_, not for creating valuble products.
It's the programmING, not the program that's valuble, the writING, not what's written.
Any idiot (or machine) can make a million copies of a program, or piece of text. What takes effort (and thus creates value) is designing that in the first place.
Intellectual Property is a distraction. What we need is more protection and focus on those who provide Intellectual Services, rather than more legal whoo-haa trying to define 'Intellectual Property'.